Do young people understand love?

[Olivia15]

Do you believe that teenagers and young adults (like 20-25) "know what love is"? Can young people understand and truly be in love? Curious about opinions!

[Sunshine]

I think you can love at every age. Children love their parents (well, most children do), and that love is real, isn't it?

As we grow older, we may understand love better and our relationship skills might improve, but I don't think being young and comparatively inexperienced makes your love less strong or real.

All the people I really loved as a child and a teen I still love now, and I can't say looking back that my love was less "true" when I was younger.

[Atonement]

I think that most people of all ages understand love itself, but there are some other things that surround love that need to be learned.

Things like how to interact with a partner, healthy relationships, boundaries, that you can love someone who's really bad for you, etc, etc.

So, while everyone knows how to love, these aren't usually things we learn as small children. They're usually things we learn by experience or through watching others during our teen years. So in that way, I think it's kind of normal that a 17 year old would be a little more knowledgable navigating the factors that surround love than a 12 year old would be. That doesn't mean they don't love, though.

[Heather]

Just some food for thought from our archives to perhaps add to the discussion: Love Letter.

[Redskies]

I confess I am always really baffled when people - usually older adults - claim that young people don't understand or don't feel "love" or "real love".

I'll try to tread at least a little lightly here, as I'm no longer a young person, but this is still personally meaningful to me, and maybe too my now-older perspective can add to this.

Often, a young person uses the word "love", and then an older person changes it out and instead uses the word "crush", both about the younger person's feelings and by talking about a crush they had when they were young. I mind that So Much, and I think that is So Not Okay! I was 11 when I started loving - and I mean romantically-loving, too - one of my closest friends. I loved my friend in that way until we were about 16. It was very different to the first gigantic crush I had on someone else. I knew my friend very well indeed, I saw when they weren't actually the-most-perfect-person-on-the-planet, and the most important thing to me about my friend was their happiness and well-being. On some significant occasions, my friend chose me to tell or to tell first about big romantic or developing-sexuality issues in their life, and even though sometimes it was a thing that was challenging for me because of my feelings, I put my friend and our friendship first. (Because that's what I wanted, not because I was a martyr. I knew my feelings weren't reciprocated, and I wanted our friendship.) I know I loved my friend, and I knew it then.

I know that young people often get told that big feelings you have when you're young won't matter when you're older. Sometimes, that's true - although it's about time passing and life changing and applies to all ages, not solely youth - and it can sometimes be liberating. But I'm pretty sure that some of you reading must feel unheard or dismissed by that attitude - I know I did, to the point where I never told anyone else how I felt about my friend - so I want to say: loving my friend in that time remains, 15-ish years later, one of the times I have most loved anyone, and one of the people I have loved the most.

Of course there are ways in which it's different to ways I have loved since, some of which are connected to age - which Heather's link above describes really well, at least for me. But I could never truthfully say that I loved my friend any less than I've loved the other most significantly loved people, and nor would I want to.